


What Dreams May Come

by LyraNgalia, rude_not_ginger



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Hallucinations, Insomnia, Mistaken Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 01:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/947155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyraNgalia/pseuds/LyraNgalia, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rude_not_ginger/pseuds/rude_not_ginger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One Angelica Norton, New York City socialite, formerly the late Irene Adler, dominatrix who brought England to its knees, finds herself walking the streets of New York City during sleepless nights. One Sherlock Holmes, recovering addict and consultant for the NYPD, finds himself doing the same as he works a case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Dreams May Come

**Author's Note:**

> An unconventional bit of _Sherlock_ / _Elementary_ crossover, written significantly before "The Woman/Heroine" aired. So if the hints of Elementary's Irene's backstory are a bit off, that would be why.

When he doesn't sleep, he swears he can see her. Going on 64 hours without sleep and his body is utterly worn out. He's focused on other things, now, and at present they're all starting to swim together. Murders, words, images. He should really cut back on eating so much, he thinks. It's making him tired.

She's different when he hasn't slept. The version of a perfectly primed dominatrix. More clever, perfectly coiffed.

“That time of night, is it?”  
  
  
She sees him sometimes, in the city. Nights when memories of Karachi becomes nightmares and she avoids sleep, or when memories of her life before her death is enough of an ache that it makes her risk detection just to be herself again, the dominatrix who nearly brought England to its knees walking like a ghost through the streets of New York City. He's different when she sees him on those nights. Rougher around the edges, wearing his damage more obviously, less cleverly calculating. Logically, she knows it can't be real, can't be true, that he is here. But it is only on bad nights that she sees him, so she dismisses it as dreams of a too-tired mind, rather than that of sentiment.

It had been Karachi, this time, that had sent her into the streets like a ghost, the dominatrix her armour against her dreams, to meet the brittle, bitter detective.

“You already know the answer to that question. Why ask?” she retorts.  
  
  
“Conversation.”

He zips up his blue vest and tucks his hands into his pockets. It's cold. He hates how cold it can get here in the winter. It makes his bees unhappy, he thinks. It makes them fussy and irritable and want to travel elsewhere, anywhere else.

Or perhaps he's thinking this because he's tired. This is very possible. 

“Not that I'm desperate for it. Not that I've missed any sort of conversations we've ever had ever.”

He looks over at her. She's taller than he remembered. Her hair is smoother. She looks tired.

“Nightmare,” he deduces.  
  
  
Her lip twitches faintly at that. “Most of our conversations were rather one-sided.”  
  
The faint smile fades away at his observation, to be replaced by an expressionless look into the middle distance as she answers, “And here I thought it was sheer stubbornness that kept you up.”  
  
  
He raises an eyebrow and asks, “Bit presumptuous, don't you think? I mean, you listened, that's more than most can say. Until Watson, but that's---different.”  
  
  
She wonders briefly if she's more tired than she'd thought, if she's rounded the corner of sleep deprivation and into temporary insanity, because his words are almost nonsensical, but dreams tended to be. She dodges around a pile of winter slush, and draws her coat around her. Manhattan is colder than London. It's an irritating truth in her little moments of fiction, but her answer is pure Irene Adler, fiction or no.  
  
  
“Presumptuous? I believe Dr. Watson might call that the pot calling the kettle black. Or is that too obvious an answer?”  
  
  
It's funny how dreams have their way of turning things around and changing them. He lets out a rueful laugh. Hardly malevolent, though. He never wanted to be malevolent around Irene. He would never have---oh, the occasional times he did want something horrific to happen to her did occur, but they were never in great seriousness.

He turns to look at her again. Sharp angles in the light, like a perfectly aligned shadow of the way things used to be.

“Yes,” he agrees, “but Watson always has a great deal to say about things I say, whether or not they're any of the good doctor's business.”  
  
  
A chuckle that is little more than a breath, a wisp of white fog from her lips in the cold air. She continues walking, offering him a sidelong glance as she does, her eyes meeting his as she catches him looking at her profile.

“I'm sure the good doctor will have plenty to say about your sleeping habits. Case tonight?”  
  
  
“Not a pleasant one, either. Little girls flayed alive. Watson's more uncomfortable than she's letting on and it's making everything moving forward difficult.”

He gives her a nod and continues, “Your nightmare, what was it about?”

  
  


“Nanny or the maintenance man?” she dodges.

That was a far better conversation than the reminder of Karachi, and Irene was tempted to push on that line of thought rather than anything else. But if this was a dream, and how could it be anything else, Irene supposes it there would be little harm in playing along.

Another sidelong look before she looks away again.

“People not being on my side when I needed them to be.”  
  
  
“Did you die?” His throat tightens as he asks, and he looks away from her, out into the cold night. Two blocks away is his father's other house, and another six to another, warmer house. The Brownstone is the coldest of the houses, of course. But he doesn't really want warmth, not with a question like that.

He clarifies, “In your dream.” In his dreams, she lives. He saves her. Over and over again.

He prefers not sleeping.  
  
  
She pauses at his answer and turns to look at him, at the way his throat works at the question, at the way he refuses to look at her. There is something in his question, something that is so very unlike the Sherlock Holmes she knew back in London. He is damaged, yes, and delusional. But there is something else there, something more broken than she remembers.

And perhaps it's that something else, that brokenness that coaxes the answer out of her, even though she remains difficult with the answer.

“Every time. I prefer not sleeping.”  
  


He turns to look at her, and there's a tightness that settles just in the middle of his stomach. He swallows and steadies his facial expression, but he is unable to keep the fact that he is trying so very hard off of his face. 

“I prefer you not sleeping, too.”

Not sleeping, not dead. Not gone. Even in this dream-form, even so wildly different, she's still Irene. He wonders if she'd fit him still, if touching her hand would be the equivalent of sliding a round peg into a square hole or the opposite.

He doesn't touch her to find out, in case it will break the illusion.

  
  


She laughs, quiet and tired, the sound edged with brittleness. She prefers sleep. In truth, she prefers rest and comfort and a life well-organized and filled with creature comforts and safety and misbehavior.

But she also prefers not starting awake to the vivid feel of a sword at her throat, to the imagined sound of crunching bone and death.

She takes a few more steps, then stops, standing in the middle of a pool of warm light cast by a streetlamp, and regards him, “So says the dream. This is skirting perilously close to insanity, you realize?”  
  
  
“I imagine I've already been there.” 

He'd take insanity, though. It would be his, uniquely his, and he would wrap it up in locks and chains and hold onto it because then she could never leave him. Never really be gone. Of course, Watson would find it. She does that. She'd find it and hand it to him an expect him to talk about it. She does that, too.

“Solve the crime with me,” he says, “You can scare a few of the officers at the NYPD precinct.”  
  
  
“What makes you think I haven't already?” she says, crossing her arms in front of her. She knows she's being reckless, but as far as she's willing to believe, this is a dream and he's always done this, made her want to play the game, to show off rather than to play it safe. “Those idiots area already learning to hide when they hear that the Norton woman is coming.”

But she looks up, where a few flakes of snow have begun drifting down, and continues, “The maintenance man then, the nanny flinches at the sight of blood, she'd be too ill after the first blow to finish the job.”  
  
  
“Norton,” he echoes. He wonders where his mind must've come up with the name. Perhaps someone Irene had known that he'd met briefly, or a particularly interesting prostitute since his arrival in New York. It hardly matters, and yet it does. Just how cruel can his mind be?

 “A new lover? Unmarried and elderly millionaire?” he suggests, “I hear my father's been looking for a new heiress to engage himself with for quite some time. You could be a Holmes.” 

Now, that would be his mind being unbelievably cruel.

He dismisses her suggestion, “Not the maintenance man. His hands are too large. Too unwieldy. This type of flaying requires precision.”  
  
  
She arches an eyebrow at that. “I made my way in the world for a long time before I met you. I don't need to shelter behind your name now.” A twitch of her lips and she continues, “Sounds more like a potential client anyway.”

She leans against the lamppost, watching the snow drift down into the cone of light. She doesn't have all the information about the case, of course, but she has some. More than most.

“I assume you've dismissed the parents. The mother's withdrawal means her hands shake too much,” she says conversationally.  
  
  
“The father's far too heartbroken to function, let alone kill anyone. Unless insanity is the option on his part.”

She's surreally beautiful, leaning up against the lamppost with the occasional flurry of snow falling around her hair like a halo. Not that Irene could've ever properly worn a halo. She would've been unbelievably boring if she did. 

He hesitates, “If I touch you, will one of the two of us disappear?”  
  
  
“Too bad an actor to be banking on insanity. His wife knows about the affair he's trying to hide.” 

The question startles her into looking back at him, back at the way tension lingers in the line of his body, in the way he's watching her like she is about to disappear. She marvels at how her mind has made those details so clear, while writing him so differently, so subtly unlike the man who'd walked into her flat in Belgravia. 

“If you do, I would expect you to disappear before I did,” she answers.  
  
  
“I should have disappeared in the first place.” There is no lack of sincerity in his words. He genuinely believes this, just as he genuinely believes that her death is his fault. No amount of psychological nagging on Watson's part will change his mind.

He looks away and sniffs, telling himself that the cold air is irritating his nose.

“Unless he doesn't know. A split personality, perhaps?”  
  
  
He is far more sincere than she'd ever have thought possible, which simply reinforces the idea that this is a figment of her overtaxed and overtired mind, that the two of them could ever be sincere in their words.

Even Karachi and Islamabad had been defined more by what had not been said than what had, by the recorded breathless moan of a mobile text alert, by the touch of skin that was an unspoken farewell.

That brings a small, melancholic smile to her lips. “You think a split personality is more likely than the mistress?”  
  
  
“Why flay them, though? It would be a lot quicker and easier to simply kill the little girls than to murder them so brutally,” he insists.

He raises his hands up to his face and rubs his eyes. “46 hours, no sleep. Hallucinating. I probably need some coffee.”  
  
  
She tsks. “Stimulants rather than sleep, when your mind's already missing the obvious?”

She gives him a searching, knowing look, and begins walking again, this time towards one of the twenty-four hour shops that managed to somehow manage to keep themselves in business by virtue of being the only thing open in the middle of the night. Over her shoulder, she adds, “Seems I'm not the only one avoiding something.”  
  
  
“You're avoiding your bad dreams and so am I.”

He'd rather her bad dreams weren't his reality.

He hurts. Going home means going to the place where the little box under the floorboards looms at him. What would Watson say if she found that, he wonders. She'd tell his father. He'd be on the streets. Certainly fitting.

“Do you ever wonder, if you and I had been out here together? In New York,” he asks.  
  
  
He was tired, to give that up so easily. Or her mind wants to win and has written him to give in. How odd that she couldn't be certain which it was.

“No. I preferred us in London,” she answers. That is how she likes to remember him. In front of the fireplace in that little flat on Baker Street. Not in the eerie jumbo jet where she'd torn him apart. Not at the country manse where he had returned the favour. Not even in Karachi or Islamabad. London was where he was most quintessentially himself, and she was most purely herself.

“But this,” she says as she weaves around another pile of snow, and gestures to the city around them, with its cold winters and busy skyscrapers and utterly irritable Americans, “will have to do, I suppose.”  
  
  
“You've survived in far worse.”

He smiles at the way she gestures, imagining the irritation at the Americans, irritation at the lack of intrigue. They're all so dull, and while it's in a way that Holmes prefers, it's not in a way Irene would. She'd despise their obviousness.

“I didn't keep the notes you sent me,” he informs her. He means paper letters. He thinks about mentioning that he blended them with Watson's breakfast, but decides not to.  
  
  
“You read them.”

She means texts. But then she would. She wasn't one to write paper letters, to leave notes behind. Too romantic, too sentimental. She prefers being cold, aloof. It protected her.

Still, her wry smile as she taps her temple is affectionate. She is tired enough that it slips out.

“That means you kept them.”  
  
  
He can't help it. He finds himself smiling. Of course he kept them. He remembers every loop and every turn of her handwriting, every pressure point against the paper. Sometimes the words get blurry, but not the shape of the letters.

Memory is a funny thing that way.

“Always.”  
  
  
She turns to look at him again, and this time she is close. Closer than the last few times she'd stopped to take him in. Her subconscious is getting sloppy, she thinks. His smile is different, even if she knows the sentiment behind it. The fact that the sentiment is there at all.

She must be tired, and a part of her wonders if the dream will fade and she will be back in Karachi with the next blink, with the next twitch in her sleep cycle. But still, she smiles, because even in a dream, in a reality dictated by her subconscious, she still counts it a win to draw sentiment out of him. Even if he is not exactly as she remembers him, even if he is in some senses warmer, in a lot of senses easier to read, to pull apart.

It is a small comfort in a sea of weary sleepless nights and perhaps it is enough.

She reaches for him, but stops, halfway there, as if changing her mind.

“Flaying's a lot harder than it looks,” she says instead. “I'd suggest finding out which of your suspects has a habit of recreational scolding.”  
  
  
Her hand stops part of the way, and he extends his own hand out, stopping just short of hers. An invisible wall of their own making keeping them apart. He'd stay awake forever if he knew she wouldn't leave. That's such a romantic ideal, it would probably make Watson's knees go weak. But no, no, Irene is gone.

“The mistress is a frequenter of some of New York's more premiere clubs in the area, but she acts as a submissive,” he finds himself saying. “I doubt I can get Watson to go ask around.”  
  
  
Dreams are funny things. The details her mind manages to spin. She can feel the radiant body heat from his hand in the space between them like a brand or a beacon in the cold winter's night, and it feels utterly real. And because she is, despite the exhaustion and the alias, uniquely and utterly herself, Irene Adler pushes the boundary and takes his hand.

That too, the dream makes feel utterly real, utterly solid beneath her fingertips. She smiles wryly, a part of her holding her breath to see if he would disappear.

“Are you trying to suggest I go looking for you?”  
  
  
His heart starts pounding in his chest at the feel of her hand in his. Small, delicate, with long, blood-red fingernails. A vicious predator in a world of very small and very stupid prey. She's the personification of his old addiction and his even older addiction. The bright, unending intellect of Irene Adler, combined with the coldness and precision of a needle.

She doesn't vanish, and he curls his hand around hers.

“You'd make far too much of a splash, I'm afraid,” he answers.  
  
  
His fingers curls around hers, and Irene's thumb brushes against his wrist. Pulse, elevated. She smiles at his words. It is enough, she thinks, to keep Karachi at bay, and she leans in to brush a kiss against his cold cheek.

“Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”  
  
  
It's a goodbye. He knows this goodbye, though the voice that spoke it sounded much different than the one that speaks it now. He keeps his eyes open as she leans forward in case she might vanish with a blink. Back to the ether of the dead and gone within his brain.

He'd forgotten how her hair smelled. His eyes burn.

“I did not take your last departure well,” he warns. Confesses.  
  
  


And that detail, too, is precise and perfect despite the differences in the larger picture. That he will always want to have the last word. His cheek is rough against her lips, and her kiss leaves a trace of red lipstick behind as she pulls away.

“You were there exactly when I needed you to be, Mr. Holmes.”

It's a reminder to herself as much as to him, that the dreams of Karachi are nothing more than nightmares, and she takes a step back. It was late, she was cold, and the flat on Fifth was beckoning. She lets go of his hand, but doesn't pull away completely, the only point of connection his fingers curled around hers.  
  
  
He doesn't let go. Even when he's rested, even when he knows she isn't there, standing in front of him in all of her ghostly beauty, he won't let go.

“If only I had been.”  
  
  
  
Surprise flickers over her face when he doesn't let go, when his grip is still warm and solid around her fingers and the world doesn't dissolve back into sleep and darkness. “Smug superiority suits you better than regret,” she tells him. Her other hand closes over his, fingertips cold but firm.  
  
  
“Give me a few hours of sleep and I'll be right back there again.”

A few hours without Irene. Though it was impossible to be without regret. Without needing penance.

“Would you forgive me, if I asked you for it?” He asked. A pause. “Begged you for it?”  
  
  
“You always do,” she says, almost fond. A moment of hesitation at the question, and she begins prying his fingers away from hers.

“You told me once you'd never beg for mercy.”

  
  


He doesn't properly let go. He won't hold her if she wants to extract herself, but he will cling just the slightest bit, and his hand will fall down to his side like it's lost all of its energy.

“And I never would,” he answers, “It's forgiveness, though and I---”

He doesn't deserve it.  
  
  
  
In the morning, she'll think about all the incongruities of the dream, all the little things that are so obviously right and all the ones that are so subtly wrong. The way he clings, ever so slightly, is one of the latter. But then to think about it in the morning was to admit that the dream had affected her, that she was bothered by it, that perhaps it wasn't a dream but some other sort of hallucinatory madness.

So perhaps she'll simply let it go. Bury this exchange in the back of her mind, a part of her knowing it will happen again.

“There isn't anything to forgive, Sherlock. We've been even for a long time.”

He'd beaten her, but she'd won, in the end. Had made him feel sentiment, and that in turn had brought him to her exactly when she'd needed him. A fair exchange, in her mind. And perhaps the reason she is content to simply know he is out there.  
  
  
  
“No.” He repeats himself, “No, you bested me, I should've left it at that.”

 And now, she's gone. Gone forever.

 “I'm going back to the Brownstone. Going to go over the case files again.”  
  
  
“The mistress isn't as submissive as you think she is,” she warns.

 He lets go, eventually, and Irene slips her hands back into her coat's pockets. She tells herself that it is simply the weather, and not the lack of his warmth that is leaving her chilled.

She nods, and begins to walk away, back towards Fifth Avenue. But her voice drifts back to him. 

“Till the next time, Mr. Holmes.”  
  
  
  
“Good night, Irene.”

He watches her go, and then turns away. He watched her go until the bitter end, once. Not this time.


End file.
